Funding my ass, they spent $820 million on the hardware, launch/transit, and 90-day operations (this during their era of chanting "smaller better cheaper"), and less than $125 million on continued operations since. On a budget that was already almost a billion dollars, you're going to tell me their primary motivation for pulling 90 days out of their ass was to save a few million on ground operations? No. Just no.
A shuttle launch, just one, is over a billion dollars. Designing hardware to last longer than 90 days in under a billion dollars is much harder. Let's say you wanted it to work for a year. Now you have to design it to last a year.
Firstly, the battery had to last a year. The batteries in the rovers did just that - they lasted over 90 days (with recharging from the sun), then failed. The rovers have been operating strictly off solar power since. The solar panels were greatly oversized as they had to accomodate the charging of batteries plus normal rover operations plus whatever dust settles on the panels to reduce output.
Now instead of 90 day batteries, you had to design 1-year batteries, which may also include things like heating systems (more weight).
Also, now you have to ensure the panels are sized to either have a year's worth of dust on them plus an unfortunate orientation (when on the rocks the rovers would orient the panels so they'd catch the sunlight, especially in winter). Plus if they weren't oversized enough you'd need the cleaning mechanism (more weight) that had no consumables.
Etc. etc. etc.
And what happens if it broke after 9 months? That's billions wasted, and an experience failed because it didn't complete it.
No, the rovers lasted as long as they did simply because they were simple enough, worked well enough, and some very careful planning of their operations to ensure they would power up "tomorrow". Heck, there have been months where rover contact was lost and regained.
FYI - another rover is being sent that's much bigger. So big that they can't use the old airbag system anymore (Soujouner was around a shoebox, Spirit and Opportunity are more of a large shipping container. The one planned for late 2011 launch is SUV-sized with more instruments and an RTG to keep electronics warm so it'll work longer based on all the science we know now.
Yes, it can make managing other parts of the system (such as the firewall of the provider) simpler. But ensure that you disable logging in with a password with it; it's otherwise just too vulnerable to distributed attacks. Also bear in mind that going from port 22 to port 2222 isn't going to help much anyway; what would be the second port that an attacker would guess? Real security is better than a miniscule amount of obscurity.
If you're doing all that, why NOT move SSH to another port? Security by obscurity alone is bad, but it's not a bad thing to do as part of defense in depth. After all, a pile of crap comes from bots trying to break in via SSH on 22. You'll clean up your SSH login logs (it won't be full of "login failed" entries) to make it easier to see if it's under attack. And if you configured the firewall to restrict IPs, even better.
It seems that everyone's jumped on "security by obscurity is bad!" bandwagon without realizing it's only bad if it's the only way you secure your system. Sure any idiot with a portscanner can find your service on another port (maybe, depending on your firewall) but most attacks happen on default ports, and eliminating 99% of the bots means you can concentrate on the 1% who really are trying to break in rather than opportunistically turning the knob to see if the door is unlocked.
If they really want to kill IE6, and other older browsers; Google, Facebook, Youtube, and the American Idol home pages need to cut support cold turkey and provide links to the top three current browsers, in random order(as to prevent the top one from being the most downloaded). Same with IPv6, just start throwing up a page for IPv4 users that says, "Hey! You're using IPv4, and this web site requires you to switch to IPv6. Here's how to change to IPv6. If you can't, call your ISP at ### and tell them you want IPv6!"
Corporations will then use the "banning of IE6" on Facebook, YouTube and American Idol as a Good Thing(tm). They're already struggling with those timesinks so if those sites will voluntarily restrict IE6 users, all the more reason to say on IE6. Google can try to eliminate their search as well but that's cutting off the nose to spite their face - that'll mean leaving money on the table in lost ad opportunities, and put Bing in a spot to catch up.
As for IPv6, you obviously don't do tech support at all, not even for your home. That'll just lead to parents asking "Where do I get Windows 6? I thought I had Windows 7!" and other crap, plus having to enable IPv6 everywhere in the house and having to deal with connectivity issues when ISPs change prefixes on you (bleh). Someone put NAT-PT in the kernel already to ease the transition...
Perhaps the better option is to merely prefix the page in question with "This event has happened over N years ago". People do change, and recency does help.
However, I also don't believe someone should escape their past, but old events should still have prominent dates displayed so people can make their own choices. If it happened 10 years ago, I'd add an update at the top saying it happened right after the dot-com bust to put it in historical context.
Leave it up to the person to address the issue head on, but also ensure that it's noted that it happened many years ago and may not reflect his current persona. After all, if I'm hiring and I see him, depending on the job, his past may be relevant. If he's going to be handling money, I wouldn't hire him. If he's going to be a codemonkey, it's possible to disregard that bit of his past.
It's not "Canadian Government" anymore. Remember, Harper has rebranded it the "Harper Government".
All Government of Canada correspondence is supposed to say "Harper Government" instead. It's one of the last decrees before the election.
Of course, one can generically refer to it as the government (no captial G) of Canada, since that's what the Harper Government is, but that's how the government is branding itself.
Or it will be until the scandal happens (it's guaranteed). Then all vestiges will disappear mysteriously overnight.
Also, have you jailbroke your iPhone? If so, it's possible you've been infected that way, especially if you've installed OpenSSH and didn't change the password. Or if you've installed "free" paid Cydia apps. Jailbreak only apps have full access to the system.
I know its off topic slightly but i got a call from a number....or even text messages with a link to call this number... on my iphone, i imagine they are making some malware for iphones too, or is that just wishful thinking on the part of parties involved calling me to get me to click on a link...anyone know or have useful links on the iphone for this too??? greatly appreciated
I think it's less malware for iPhone, and more either a spammer/telemarketer got your number or one of your friends may have gotten invited.
The malware sends text messages to spam your friends with the hopes of infecting them, not spam you and make itself known. I'm not even sure iOS lets apps send an SMS without invoking some system API to bring you to the main SMS app.
Umm, no, that would be the worst case scenario, wouldn't it? Every time there's a round of media coverage about Google zapping apps on the Android Market, I get the feeling that it's an attempt to condemn the security model of the Android OS, when the actual problem is the users' lack of discretion in installing junk!
If a user wants to install that junk becaues they like it for whatever reason, there's nothing that will stop them. (And this applies to iOS as well - people will do all sorts of things like jailbreaking and installing OpenSSH etc. to do stuff like pirate apps.)
Android it like a PC with respect to openess and security - and we all know Windows users will install crap, so will Android users. There's little Microsoft or Google can do to Windows or Android to compromise this (over say, iOS) without losing what makes Android special - it's freedom.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilence. Alas, the typical user doesn't want to watch over their PC, or their phone. The/. crowd can crow about Android's freedom, but also have to realize that they're more vigilent than the typical user who just sees a pretty shiny and installs it.
Sadly, I'm not sure what the middle of the road path is between walled garden and complete freedom. And I'm wondering how long until carriers preinstall antivirus scanners and anti malware tools and add a "malware tool monthly update" charge to bills.
Android is secured by default by disallowing the use of Unknown Sources. If you attempt to enable Unknown Sources for applications it will warn you about risking security. In addition you must know what you're doing to install the Unknown Source APK by either: using 'adb install', or downloading the APK to your SD card and use a file manager application to install it. So yes, Android is just as secure as iOS by default.
If you want those free Amazon apps, you have Unknown Sources allowed, so there's that protection gone. (It's why Amazon doesn't work on AT&T right now, and probably why AT&T is going to have the option - some Amazon-AT&T deal).
And people will trust Amazon so they'll obediently set that checkbox.
As for installing an infected APK - all you need to do is visit the link on Android - someone sends you a link via e-mail, a QR code, or a website offering APKs for download (say, SlideME Marketplace - you can download free apps via their web site). Hell, all you need is to post in any forum "Get paid Android apps for FREE!" and they'll willingly install it.
Hell, considering you can convince people to copy and paste blobs of javascript i ntheir webbrowsers to do some facebook thing, I'd guess you can get them to use adb install as well.
Just like the iOS SSH issue - you can get people to not only install OpenSSH on their iOS device, but also SFTP and an SSH client on their PC.
It's remarkable how far users will go to do these things.
Coming next in Ice Cream - an option to finely control where APKs can come from to prevent people who use Amazon from exposing their phone to unintended app installs as well.
Perhaps you missed the "Activision" part of Activision-Blizzard. Besides squeezing all the money they can, they also want to control everything. (See paid subscriptions for MW3)
Which is why I'll probablly be skipping this game as well. Bad memories of the Bnet2.0 issues that kept me from progressing far in SC2, and by the time it was resolved, it was only a month away from Halo Reach (SC2 was to entertain me until then), and I'd lost interest.
Also why I've lost interest in Diablo 3 as well. Activision has screwed things up so horribly.
Apple was a joke until Microsoft bailed them out with $150M in 1997 - the single fact that the fanbois conveniently ignore.
Actually, during the 90's, Apple still had a HUGE warchest of money (close to a billion) - that $150M was barely a drop in the bucket. Now, at the rate Apple was losing money, it would exhaust itself in probably a decade or so.
Apple was literally in a good positoin to shut down and return all the money to investors - it still had significant assets. It just had no future - and shutting down would be a great possibility because of it (shutdown now while there's tons of assets).
The fact that people believe that $150M "saved" Apple was the result. Apple didn't need the cash (Microsoft cashed out a few years later around the millennium), but they needed the business optics. And Microsoft throwing money into a company seen as having no future means they probably know something.
It was more of a confidence builder that Apple had a bright(er) future ahead. Money talks on Wall Street, and $150M was small enough that Apple wouldn't be owned significantly by Microsoft, but large enough to get the attention of everyone.
A major chunk of the World of Warcraft player-base already loathes Activision. That is a great start.
I think a major chunk of those who bought Blizzard products loathe Activision for destroying Blizzard. I picked up StarCraft 2 and issues kept me from enjoying it for several weeks, by which point I ditched it (it got resolved, but I was hoping for SC2 to bridge me to Halo Reach, and we're talking about 1 month from when I could play again to Halo Reach's release. Go go indie game packs I bought.)
The problem is Activision is pretty much about trying to milk every dollar possible then dump. Buy up good developers, milk stuff until it's no longer profitable while maintaining minimal investment, then dump it. It's all about ROI now. Get as much money now as possible, a buck now is better than two bucks tomorrow sorta deal.
That's why it was a sad day to see Bungie get swallowed in by Activision. (As a Halo fan, I'm not too upset - Microsoft at least recognizes that they have a franchise worth preserving rather than sucking the blood completely dry and throwing the husk away in a year or two)
It's pretty astounding that these companies can whine about data usage of their paying customers, and then not bat an eye and upload who knows how many gigabytes of useless games/apps to people who don't even want the crap.
I've wondered about that - it seems in my experience that Android apps are small but they're often "downloaders" of more content - that is you buy the app, run it only to find out it needs another 90+MB of data files to download.
Which is somewhat annoying, being used to the iPhone method where it won't let you do an OTA download like that, but is self contained so you sync it with iTunes and you're ready to play.
Then again, Gameloft bypasses the Android Marketplace (probably with good reason - they're playing whack-a-mole with iPhone piracy), so maybe they do something different with Android phones...
And if where you work requires it, this isnt an option.
Obviously work isn't requiring it. Because if they did, it would be an Ask Slashdot now will it?
If work wants me to carry a smartphone, they're not only paying for it, but if they require me to keep it with me on vacation, they're paying roaming. I don't care they're paying $2/minute for roaming or sending me 200kB emails (at $0.05/kB, that's $10) - it's their responsibility.
If the company doesn't want to pay roaming, they either get me a SIM already, or the phone stays at home.
It's not my job to minimize company expenses on my vacation. That's the price they'll have to eat if they want me to always be in contact.
You had the option of going with a standard merchant account as well. You just have to offer Paypal with eBay.
Oh wait, most merchant accounts screw with you worse than Paypal - demanding minimum transaction amounts (you must do $1K+ per month, or more), arbitrary holds (21 days? Hah. Some can hold for 90+ days), and all sorts of other crap.
Trust me, if you want to accept random amounts of money from people, your only option is Paypal. Unless you're a business, you can't accept credit cards at all otherwise.
And for all the bitching you hear about Paypal, most fairly deserved, it never seems to occur to people that they can use Amazon Payments or Google Checkout as well. Oh wait, they're also merchant accounts and you're screwed unless you're a business. Or just accepting money orders, but those aren't convenient to the buyer at all, having to get one, and send it via snail mail.
You'd think Paypal would have competition in the area of letting two random people exchange money.
This is what you get when the gadgets are given away or subsidized. Abuse will ensue to make sure the provider recovers their costs.
False. We've already seen a phone at least where you can buy it subsidized and it comes with ZERO carrier crap. You can choose to install it, though. Hell, it's not only subsidized, but it comes with no carrier branding.
Yes, it seems Verizon and AT&T have managed to crumble to Apple and keep the phones stock - installing no apps nor branding (the only branding on the Verizon iPhone is... the Apple logo on the back).
Which makes it interesting since rumors have it that Sprint and T-Mobile are getting it, which may be the cleanest phones sold by them as well.
And yes, you can buy it for the subsidized rate.
Apple can do it, and 4 years ago it had no mobile experience. HTC, Samsung, LG, Motorola, these companies have sold phones for years before Apple. Yet Apple can stroll on in, demand profit sharing, and even offer subsidized phones (starting with the 3G) and refuse to allow any carrier branding or crapware installed.
Using locks and the like make it very easy to do multithreaded and parallel programs.
The big problem comes when you need multiple locks because you find your program is waiting more on locks than anything else which is gumming up the whole works, and that can easily lead to deadlocks and other fun stuff.
Another way is to consider lockless algorithms, which don't have such blocking mechanisms. However, then you get into issues where atomicity isn't quite so atomic thanks to memory queues and re-ordering done in the modern CPU, and thus have to start adding memory barriers before doing your atomic exchanges.
Raymond Chen (of Microsoft) did a nice write up of the lockfree ways to do things and what Windows provides to accomplish them.
Or better yet, "This is the software we supplied with yoru phone. The bootloader is unlocked. Seek future updates from the community".
After all, it seems HTC has a trillion phones (really a few phones in many combinations), so surely supporting every one of them wll be a pain. Perhaps this is how they'll get out of the 18-month support thing Google is trying to impose on Android vendors. After all, once the phone is sold, HTC makes no money, so if they can just fixate on making new phones and stuff, it saves them on support.
The FCC did enact a rule discounting special interest group complaints, which had an interesting side effect of well, moving them onto bigger and better things.
After hours trading?! Now call me out of the loop here but I was under the assumption this was illegal? If it turned legal then I am very troubled by this.
Why? After-hours trading is just that - people wanting to trade when the markets are closed. This happens all the time, especially in forex. Travelling around the world would become very annoying if you could only change currency when the market was open, for example.
What happens is the two entities get together, agree on a price, and the trade happens when the market opens.
The market requires buyers and sellers, and trades happen when the two actually conduct the transaction. If company XYZ last trade price happened at say, $10, I can't just go out and wave $10 in the air for a share. I have to look at the market and see if there are any sellers willing to sell me a share for $10. If the lowest any seller is willing to go (ask) is $10.50, then nothing happens, Instead, if I'm the highest buyer at the moment, the bid price is $10. Either someone steps up and offers to sell me a share for $10, or I step up and offer to buy it at $10.50. In the first case, the price will stay at $10. In the second, it'll "rise" to $10.50.
After-hours trading continues the same way - just because the markets are closed doesn't mean the buyers and sellers stand outside (figuratively) until it reopens. They, like in real life, will mingle and make agreements to buy and sell while they wait for the market to reopen. When it does, those after-hour trades are executed per their agreements.
It happens to everything else in real life - imagine how useful online shopping will be if after hours trading is banned? If you want to order a book from Amazon, you have to wait for them to reopen before ordering? No, because they allow orders to come in while their warehouses are closed for the night. It's still after hours trading. The orders are fulfilled the next business day.
Yeah, it's a color. Most color lasers have horrible toner costs - replacing an entire set of 4 can often run easily $600+.
But a cheap laser printer that only does black and white can be had very cheaply, and for most of them, even the toner cartridges tend to last at least 1000 pages on the one packed in. 2500 seems to be around the standard for consumer lasers, and 5000+ for office lasers. And we're talking about cartridge prices of $100 or under normally (versus $100 for inkjets that barely do 500).
We've moved from an inkjet to a laser, and I don't think I've ever run into a situation where I've missed the ability to print in color.
Photos are best done with a real printer using real photo paper - they'll last longer and look better than those inkjet based photo printers at the store. Costco digital prints can be had very cheaply.
Also, credit cards, debit cards and checks claim prior art.
Except that it required cooperation with your financial institution to get at this data, and if you use separate financial insitutions (not unusual), it's hard to correlate all that data into one complete profile.
With Google Wallet, you'll just literally Google the information out in one go. And querying one big entity with information on all of us is much easier than having to gather from multiple companies and reconstruct the trail from there.
Ditto loyalty cards - if someone profiles you, they'll have to go to all the supermarkets you use. If you use several, it's several databases you have to query and correlate.
The little I've heard from TSA agents (the ones doing the pat downs) makes it sound like they think it's stupid too. It's the old, "I hate it, but I'm just doing my job." line.
Accurate or not, it gives me the impression that these measures are just more, "See! I'm doing something!" crap from the more politically minded higher-ups.
Unfortunately, it appears the security theatre works.
Here in Canada, a bunch of security personnel got laid off, and they're rallying exactly around the issue. "Without all of us, security standards will lapse during busy periods!"
It's the political football. You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't. Cutting staff? Security will go down because they can't do these things anymore. Make it illegal to do these things? Security will go down because it's the only way to ensure security.
Screw that. Security prior to 9/11 was just as adequate for the most part.
Last time I checked, calculator in Windows 7 has a "programmer" mode as well as scientific and basic, that on first glance is helpful (swap between bases) but doesn't really allow you to do much calculation. If I'm not mistaken, they've also removed the functionality to switch between number bases in the scientific mode. And finally it doesn't keep your current calculation up when you swap modes.
Unless they changed it in 7, it works just fine in XP calculator. The base is settable from binary, decimal, octal and hex, and it'll convert the current value on screen to whatever the current base is.
It doesn't do floating point in anything but decimal though.
Sure this is a great addition... for power users who are infallible.
But for Joe Average and power users who fall prey to it (who doesn't?), it doesn't address the primary issue - called the Dancing Bunnies or Dancing Pigs problem. And it's a problem with every OS today - Linux, Windows MacOS X, Android, iOS, and others.
A user will run through many hoops to get what they want. They'll root, jailbreak, install alternative app stores, etc just to save 99 cents for an app. Even if they have to do seemingly complex tasks like install an SSH server, run SSH, type command line commands, etc. It can be amazing how much technical skill the untalented suddenly have.
And the problem is, these are the people that get pwned. Jailbroken iPhones with default SSH passwords. Android phones with botnets installed (courtesy alternate marketplaces), Windows/OS X trojans running botnets, etc. Heck, even Bender skipped his antivirus check for pr0n.
And it's a really difficult problem to solve. Even if these options were global and set reasonably, you can anticipate some app telling you it works better if you do these things to let it get the permissions it wants.
Hell, see the latest Facebook spamming trends, where people are doing things like copying-and-pasting URLs or godawful long javascript blobs. We're at the point where really, the Honor System virus does exist.
Slashdot Mirror
A shuttle launch, just one, is over a billion dollars. Designing hardware to last longer than 90 days in under a billion dollars is much harder. Let's say you wanted it to work for a year. Now you have to design it to last a year.
Firstly, the battery had to last a year. The batteries in the rovers did just that - they lasted over 90 days (with recharging from the sun), then failed. The rovers have been operating strictly off solar power since. The solar panels were greatly oversized as they had to accomodate the charging of batteries plus normal rover operations plus whatever dust settles on the panels to reduce output.
Now instead of 90 day batteries, you had to design 1-year batteries, which may also include things like heating systems (more weight).
Also, now you have to ensure the panels are sized to either have a year's worth of dust on them plus an unfortunate orientation (when on the rocks the rovers would orient the panels so they'd catch the sunlight, especially in winter). Plus if they weren't oversized enough you'd need the cleaning mechanism (more weight) that had no consumables.
Etc. etc. etc.
And what happens if it broke after 9 months? That's billions wasted, and an experience failed because it didn't complete it.
No, the rovers lasted as long as they did simply because they were simple enough, worked well enough, and some very careful planning of their operations to ensure they would power up "tomorrow". Heck, there have been months where rover contact was lost and regained.
FYI - another rover is being sent that's much bigger. So big that they can't use the old airbag system anymore (Soujouner was around a shoebox, Spirit and Opportunity are more of a large shipping container. The one planned for late 2011 launch is SUV-sized with more instruments and an RTG to keep electronics warm so it'll work longer based on all the science we know now.
If you're doing all that, why NOT move SSH to another port? Security by obscurity alone is bad, but it's not a bad thing to do as part of defense in depth. After all, a pile of crap comes from bots trying to break in via SSH on 22. You'll clean up your SSH login logs (it won't be full of "login failed" entries) to make it easier to see if it's under attack. And if you configured the firewall to restrict IPs, even better.
It seems that everyone's jumped on "security by obscurity is bad!" bandwagon without realizing it's only bad if it's the only way you secure your system. Sure any idiot with a portscanner can find your service on another port (maybe, depending on your firewall) but most attacks happen on default ports, and eliminating 99% of the bots means you can concentrate on the 1% who really are trying to break in rather than opportunistically turning the knob to see if the door is unlocked.
Corporations will then use the "banning of IE6" on Facebook, YouTube and American Idol as a Good Thing(tm). They're already struggling with those timesinks so if those sites will voluntarily restrict IE6 users, all the more reason to say on IE6. Google can try to eliminate their search as well but that's cutting off the nose to spite their face - that'll mean leaving money on the table in lost ad opportunities, and put Bing in a spot to catch up.
As for IPv6, you obviously don't do tech support at all, not even for your home. That'll just lead to parents asking "Where do I get Windows 6? I thought I had Windows 7!" and other crap, plus having to enable IPv6 everywhere in the house and having to deal with connectivity issues when ISPs change prefixes on you (bleh). Someone put NAT-PT in the kernel already to ease the transition...
Perhaps the better option is to merely prefix the page in question with "This event has happened over N years ago". People do change, and recency does help.
However, I also don't believe someone should escape their past, but old events should still have prominent dates displayed so people can make their own choices. If it happened 10 years ago, I'd add an update at the top saying it happened right after the dot-com bust to put it in historical context.
Leave it up to the person to address the issue head on, but also ensure that it's noted that it happened many years ago and may not reflect his current persona. After all, if I'm hiring and I see him, depending on the job, his past may be relevant. If he's going to be handling money, I wouldn't hire him. If he's going to be a codemonkey, it's possible to disregard that bit of his past.
It's not "Canadian Government" anymore. Remember, Harper has rebranded it the "Harper Government".
All Government of Canada correspondence is supposed to say "Harper Government" instead. It's one of the last decrees before the election.
Of course, one can generically refer to it as the government (no captial G) of Canada, since that's what the Harper Government is, but that's how the government is branding itself.
Or it will be until the scandal happens (it's guaranteed). Then all vestiges will disappear mysteriously overnight.
Addendum. I meant your friends got infected.
Also, have you jailbroke your iPhone? If so, it's possible you've been infected that way, especially if you've installed OpenSSH and didn't change the password. Or if you've installed "free" paid Cydia apps. Jailbreak only apps have full access to the system.
I think it's less malware for iPhone, and more either a spammer/telemarketer got your number or one of your friends may have gotten invited.
The malware sends text messages to spam your friends with the hopes of infecting them, not spam you and make itself known. I'm not even sure iOS lets apps send an SMS without invoking some system API to bring you to the main SMS app.
That's because the Android security model does fail in that attempt. It's ignoring the obvious security flaw - that if a user is confronted with a choice between security and dancing pigs, dancing pigs wins.
If a user wants to install that junk becaues they like it for whatever reason, there's nothing that will stop them. (And this applies to iOS as well - people will do all sorts of things like jailbreaking and installing OpenSSH etc. to do stuff like pirate apps.)
Android it like a PC with respect to openess and security - and we all know Windows users will install crap, so will Android users. There's little Microsoft or Google can do to Windows or Android to compromise this (over say, iOS) without losing what makes Android special - it's freedom.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilence. Alas, the typical user doesn't want to watch over their PC, or their phone. The /. crowd can crow about Android's freedom, but also have to realize that they're more vigilent than the typical user who just sees a pretty shiny and installs it.
Sadly, I'm not sure what the middle of the road path is between walled garden and complete freedom. And I'm wondering how long until carriers preinstall antivirus scanners and anti malware tools and add a "malware tool monthly update" charge to bills.
If you want those free Amazon apps, you have Unknown Sources allowed, so there's that protection gone. (It's why Amazon doesn't work on AT&T right now, and probably why AT&T is going to have the option - some Amazon-AT&T deal).
And people will trust Amazon so they'll obediently set that checkbox.
As for installing an infected APK - all you need to do is visit the link on Android - someone sends you a link via e-mail, a QR code, or a website offering APKs for download (say, SlideME Marketplace - you can download free apps via their web site). Hell, all you need is to post in any forum "Get paid Android apps for FREE!" and they'll willingly install it.
Hell, considering you can convince people to copy and paste blobs of javascript i ntheir webbrowsers to do some facebook thing, I'd guess you can get them to use adb install as well.
Just like the iOS SSH issue - you can get people to not only install OpenSSH on their iOS device, but also SFTP and an SSH client on their PC.
It's remarkable how far users will go to do these things.
Coming next in Ice Cream - an option to finely control where APKs can come from to prevent people who use Amazon from exposing their phone to unintended app installs as well.
Perhaps you missed the "Activision" part of Activision-Blizzard. Besides squeezing all the money they can, they also want to control everything. (See paid subscriptions for MW3)
Which is why I'll probablly be skipping this game as well. Bad memories of the Bnet2.0 issues that kept me from progressing far in SC2, and by the time it was resolved, it was only a month away from Halo Reach (SC2 was to entertain me until then), and I'd lost interest.
Also why I've lost interest in Diablo 3 as well. Activision has screwed things up so horribly.
Actually, during the 90's, Apple still had a HUGE warchest of money (close to a billion) - that $150M was barely a drop in the bucket. Now, at the rate Apple was losing money, it would exhaust itself in probably a decade or so.
Apple was literally in a good positoin to shut down and return all the money to investors - it still had significant assets. It just had no future - and shutting down would be a great possibility because of it (shutdown now while there's tons of assets).
The fact that people believe that $150M "saved" Apple was the result. Apple didn't need the cash (Microsoft cashed out a few years later around the millennium), but they needed the business optics. And Microsoft throwing money into a company seen as having no future means they probably know something.
It was more of a confidence builder that Apple had a bright(er) future ahead. Money talks on Wall Street, and $150M was small enough that Apple wouldn't be owned significantly by Microsoft, but large enough to get the attention of everyone.
I think a major chunk of those who bought Blizzard products loathe Activision for destroying Blizzard. I picked up StarCraft 2 and issues kept me from enjoying it for several weeks, by which point I ditched it (it got resolved, but I was hoping for SC2 to bridge me to Halo Reach, and we're talking about 1 month from when I could play again to Halo Reach's release. Go go indie game packs I bought.)
The problem is Activision is pretty much about trying to milk every dollar possible then dump. Buy up good developers, milk stuff until it's no longer profitable while maintaining minimal investment, then dump it. It's all about ROI now. Get as much money now as possible, a buck now is better than two bucks tomorrow sorta deal.
That's why it was a sad day to see Bungie get swallowed in by Activision. (As a Halo fan, I'm not too upset - Microsoft at least recognizes that they have a franchise worth preserving rather than sucking the blood completely dry and throwing the husk away in a year or two)
I've wondered about that - it seems in my experience that Android apps are small but they're often "downloaders" of more content - that is you buy the app, run it only to find out it needs another 90+MB of data files to download.
Which is somewhat annoying, being used to the iPhone method where it won't let you do an OTA download like that, but is self contained so you sync it with iTunes and you're ready to play.
Then again, Gameloft bypasses the Android Marketplace (probably with good reason - they're playing whack-a-mole with iPhone piracy), so maybe they do something different with Android phones...
Obviously work isn't requiring it. Because if they did, it would be an Ask Slashdot now will it?
If work wants me to carry a smartphone, they're not only paying for it, but if they require me to keep it with me on vacation, they're paying roaming. I don't care they're paying $2/minute for roaming or sending me 200kB emails (at $0.05/kB, that's $10) - it's their responsibility.
If the company doesn't want to pay roaming, they either get me a SIM already, or the phone stays at home.
It's not my job to minimize company expenses on my vacation. That's the price they'll have to eat if they want me to always be in contact.
You had the option of going with a standard merchant account as well. You just have to offer Paypal with eBay.
Oh wait, most merchant accounts screw with you worse than Paypal - demanding minimum transaction amounts (you must do $1K+ per month, or more), arbitrary holds (21 days? Hah. Some can hold for 90+ days), and all sorts of other crap.
Trust me, if you want to accept random amounts of money from people, your only option is Paypal. Unless you're a business, you can't accept credit cards at all otherwise.
And for all the bitching you hear about Paypal, most fairly deserved, it never seems to occur to people that they can use Amazon Payments or Google Checkout as well. Oh wait, they're also merchant accounts and you're screwed unless you're a business. Or just accepting money orders, but those aren't convenient to the buyer at all, having to get one, and send it via snail mail.
You'd think Paypal would have competition in the area of letting two random people exchange money.
False. We've already seen a phone at least where you can buy it subsidized and it comes with ZERO carrier crap. You can choose to install it, though. Hell, it's not only subsidized, but it comes with no carrier branding.
Yes, it seems Verizon and AT&T have managed to crumble to Apple and keep the phones stock - installing no apps nor branding (the only branding on the Verizon iPhone is ... the Apple logo on the back).
Which makes it interesting since rumors have it that Sprint and T-Mobile are getting it, which may be the cleanest phones sold by them as well.
And yes, you can buy it for the subsidized rate.
Apple can do it, and 4 years ago it had no mobile experience. HTC, Samsung, LG, Motorola, these companies have sold phones for years before Apple. Yet Apple can stroll on in, demand profit sharing, and even offer subsidized phones (starting with the 3G) and refuse to allow any carrier branding or crapware installed.
Using locks and the like make it very easy to do multithreaded and parallel programs.
The big problem comes when you need multiple locks because you find your program is waiting more on locks than anything else which is gumming up the whole works, and that can easily lead to deadlocks and other fun stuff.
Another way is to consider lockless algorithms, which don't have such blocking mechanisms. However, then you get into issues where atomicity isn't quite so atomic thanks to memory queues and re-ordering done in the modern CPU, and thus have to start adding memory barriers before doing your atomic exchanges.
Raymond Chen (of Microsoft) did a nice write up of the lockfree ways to do things and what Windows provides to accomplish them.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/05/10149783.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/06/10150261.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/06/10150262.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/07/10150728.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/08/10151159.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/08/10151258.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/12/10152296.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/13/10152929.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/14/10153633.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/15/10154245.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/19/10155452.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/20/10156014.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/21/10156539.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/04/22/10156894.aspx
Or better yet, "This is the software we supplied with yoru phone. The bootloader is unlocked. Seek future updates from the community".
After all, it seems HTC has a trillion phones (really a few phones in many combinations), so surely supporting every one of them wll be a pain. Perhaps this is how they'll get out of the 18-month support thing Google is trying to impose on Android vendors. After all, once the phone is sold, HTC makes no money, so if they can just fixate on making new phones and stuff, it saves them on support.
The FCC did enact a rule discounting special interest group complaints, which had an interesting side effect of well, moving them onto bigger and better things.
Like Apple's App Store started seeing huge increases in the number of app complaints for porn apps after a PTC campaign. And after that, they started targeting other marketplaces as well.
Religion is, again, to blame for this. We should exercise the right of freedom of religion to also be freedom FROM religion.
Why? After-hours trading is just that - people wanting to trade when the markets are closed. This happens all the time, especially in forex. Travelling around the world would become very annoying if you could only change currency when the market was open, for example.
What happens is the two entities get together, agree on a price, and the trade happens when the market opens.
The market requires buyers and sellers, and trades happen when the two actually conduct the transaction. If company XYZ last trade price happened at say, $10, I can't just go out and wave $10 in the air for a share. I have to look at the market and see if there are any sellers willing to sell me a share for $10. If the lowest any seller is willing to go (ask) is $10.50, then nothing happens, Instead, if I'm the highest buyer at the moment, the bid price is $10. Either someone steps up and offers to sell me a share for $10, or I step up and offer to buy it at $10.50. In the first case, the price will stay at $10. In the second, it'll "rise" to $10.50.
After-hours trading continues the same way - just because the markets are closed doesn't mean the buyers and sellers stand outside (figuratively) until it reopens. They, like in real life, will mingle and make agreements to buy and sell while they wait for the market to reopen. When it does, those after-hour trades are executed per their agreements.
It happens to everything else in real life - imagine how useful online shopping will be if after hours trading is banned? If you want to order a book from Amazon, you have to wait for them to reopen before ordering? No, because they allow orders to come in while their warehouses are closed for the night. It's still after hours trading. The orders are fulfilled the next business day.
Yeah, it's a color. Most color lasers have horrible toner costs - replacing an entire set of 4 can often run easily $600+.
But a cheap laser printer that only does black and white can be had very cheaply, and for most of them, even the toner cartridges tend to last at least 1000 pages on the one packed in. 2500 seems to be around the standard for consumer lasers, and 5000+ for office lasers. And we're talking about cartridge prices of $100 or under normally (versus $100 for inkjets that barely do 500).
We've moved from an inkjet to a laser, and I don't think I've ever run into a situation where I've missed the ability to print in color.
Photos are best done with a real printer using real photo paper - they'll last longer and look better than those inkjet based photo printers at the store. Costco digital prints can be had very cheaply.
Except that it required cooperation with your financial institution to get at this data, and if you use separate financial insitutions (not unusual), it's hard to correlate all that data into one complete profile.
With Google Wallet, you'll just literally Google the information out in one go. And querying one big entity with information on all of us is much easier than having to gather from multiple companies and reconstruct the trail from there.
Ditto loyalty cards - if someone profiles you, they'll have to go to all the supermarkets you use. If you use several, it's several databases you have to query and correlate.
Unfortunately, it appears the security theatre works.
Here in Canada, a bunch of security personnel got laid off, and they're rallying exactly around the issue. "Without all of us, security standards will lapse during busy periods!"
It's the political football. You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't. Cutting staff? Security will go down because they can't do these things anymore. Make it illegal to do these things? Security will go down because it's the only way to ensure security.
Screw that. Security prior to 9/11 was just as adequate for the most part.
Unless they changed it in 7, it works just fine in XP calculator. The base is settable from binary, decimal, octal and hex, and it'll convert the current value on screen to whatever the current base is.
It doesn't do floating point in anything but decimal though.
Sure this is a great addition... for power users who are infallible.
But for Joe Average and power users who fall prey to it (who doesn't?), it doesn't address the primary issue - called the Dancing Bunnies or Dancing Pigs problem. And it's a problem with every OS today - Linux, Windows MacOS X, Android, iOS, and others.
A user will run through many hoops to get what they want. They'll root, jailbreak, install alternative app stores, etc just to save 99 cents for an app. Even if they have to do seemingly complex tasks like install an SSH server, run SSH, type command line commands, etc. It can be amazing how much technical skill the untalented suddenly have.
And the problem is, these are the people that get pwned. Jailbroken iPhones with default SSH passwords. Android phones with botnets installed (courtesy alternate marketplaces), Windows/OS X trojans running botnets, etc. Heck, even Bender skipped his antivirus check for pr0n.
And it's a really difficult problem to solve. Even if these options were global and set reasonably, you can anticipate some app telling you it works better if you do these things to let it get the permissions it wants.
Hell, see the latest Facebook spamming trends, where people are doing things like copying-and-pasting URLs or godawful long javascript blobs. We're at the point where really, the Honor System virus does exist.